The present invention generally relates to personal communication devices, and more particularly to call forwarding systems for personal communication devices.
The wireless telephone industry has long noted that the proliferation of wireless telephones, voice mail systems, pagers, etc. has caused a great deal of confusion since callers often need to know multiple telephone numbers (i.e., office, home, wireless telephone, pager, travel destination telephone numbers, etc.) to have a good probability of contacting the user (subscriber). In addition, calls to wireless telephones are routinely missed if the wireless telephone is turned off. Even if the caller is aware of other likely locations for the user, the probability of contact may still be very low in light of inherent user mobility. This results in loss of accessibility for the mobile telephone user and may negatively impact productivity, business income, family contact, etc. These are all major factors in the original decision for purchasing a wireless telephone (i.e., greater accessibility).
One way to address this problem is to have the subscriber provide to the service provider a list of alternate telephone numbers at which the user may be reached, and the service provider could forward incoming calls accordingly. The user could order the list in the order in which the service provider should try the numbers. Callers may be given only the one mobile telephone number. In this way, when a call is not answered by the mobile phone, the service provider would then call each of the preprogrammed numbers in succession. This solution leads to a great deal of inconvenience for the calling party since accessing all numbers in the list could take a long time.
A second attempt to solve this problem is based on hardware supported call forwarding. Special hardware, such as a land-line residential base station in a dual mode cordless/cellular system, may detect the presence of the mobile unit when within range of the special hardware (i.e., the mobile unit is at work or at home). The special hardware then notifies the wireless telephone system to forward all calls to the preprogrammed land line telephone at that location. Unfortunately, this solution requires a large investment by the user in the special hardware, as well as system infrastructure modifications, and works only if the mobile unit is within range of the special hardware.
There is, therefore, a need in the industry for a system for addressing these and other related and unrelated problems.